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Twitch has changed their Android authentication scheme to a more straight forward (iOS) way. I applaud their engineers, they certainly do look more employable now! If only they’d allow Windows users to use their HLS/HTML5 players, too… But I digress. Let’s look at what they’ve created.

Just a quick heads up, since DynDNS has, unbeknownst to me, changed their SLA, effectively deleting bogy.mine.nu – my now over a decade old host alias – I was forced to create a new redirect with a different company.

I recently figured out how to access the mobile devices streams that Twitch.tv puts out for their Android (and presumably iPhone) apps. Due to the way in which the stream works, I couldn’t think of anything cool to do with it myself, but maybe someone else can benefit from this information. Continue reading →

The increase in popularity of user-generated streams, driven by Starcraft II and several of the games in the moba genre, has given rise to an enormous expansion of streaming providers such as Twitch.tv and Own3d.tv. Unfortunately, to enjoy these streams, you’re usually tied to a browser window and the flash player to enjoy these streams. You can name the upsides of this solution all you want, but the obvious downsides remain:

doesn’t work on systems that don’t have the flash player (like those heinous i-devices)

introduces horrible usability, e.g.:

no volume adjusting by scroll wheel or multimedia keys

no clicking onto the video to bring focus to it (without it redirecting you to some page)

no small window-borders, instead you have the cluttered browser ui where it’s completely unnecessary

no way of viewing the actual resolution of the stream’s video data

high cpu load when VLC can playback h264 using the GPU’s video decoding unit to do this more efficiently

…

… i guess you catch my drift.

Sadly, streaming providers such as the aforementioned ones don’t provide a portable, universally usable address that users can just plug into their system’s favorite video player to playback these streams. This is where this article comes in.

Preamble

As someone who loves tinkering with his gadgets and tries to get the most out of them, i’ve always been somewhat disappointed with camera applications available for the android platform. Usually, they either cost money (Vignette), or are crappy anyway (Camera360), just adding some colorization filters to the functionality that is already provided by the stock Android camera.

The HTC camera applications that ship with their Sense UI are usually better than anything you’ll find in the Android market, sadly though, they rely on proprietary libraries shipped with Sense, which itself heavily modifies the Android UI system. Bottom line: unless you’re running a Sense ROM on your HTC Device, you simply can’t use the stock HTC Sense camera application.

As lots of people prefer a stable non-Sense (ha ha!) ROM such as Cyanogenmod on their device, running the HTC application is out of the question, and usually you’ll find a lot of people discontent with the stock Android camera app’s functionality. It lacks proper focusing modes (like tap to focus), the UI looks like it was written for the Gameboy and usually, you don’t find a lot of options to adapt the application’s behavior like shutter sounds.

It has been an entire year since I’ve last posted an article, and what better opportunity than the one year anniversary of that last post could there possibly be to present the offspring of my latest surge in productivity? None, i tell you!

About Chrome

Google Chrome, the up and coming web browser draws people toward itself in very much the same way that moths are drawn to the corona of a watchtower, exceeding the 10% mark in terms of total browser market share and thereby bringing the WebKit HTML rendering engine to almost double as many people as Apple’s Safari has been able to.

As a relatively new browser (2.5 years old), and similar to most popular applications that permit the development of plug-ins, it has always had a flourishing community of developers that try and augment its capabilities to the best of their abilities (to the extent that Chrome allows them), and today I’m taking the time to introduce one that in its current form isn’t yet known to the Chrome platform.